Harmonised Unemployment Rates (HURs), OECD - Updated: January 2014

OECD unemployment rate falls to 7.8% in November 2013

14/01/2014 - The OECD unemployment rate decreased by 0.1 percentage point to 7.8% in November 2013 compared with 7.9% in the previous five months. Across the OECD area, 47.1 million persons were unemployed in November 2013, 12.4 million more than in July 2008.

In the euro area, the unemployment rate was stable at 12.1% in November. However, the unemployment rate reached a new high in Italy (at 12.7%) and increased by 0.2 percentage points in Slovenia (at 9.9%) while it decreased by 0.2 percentage points in Ireland (to 12.3%) and the Slovak Republic (to 14.0%) and remained stable in France (at 10.8%) and Germany (at 5.2%).

Among other OECD countries, the unemployment rate fell in November by 0.3 percentage point in Mexico (to 4.6%) and Israel (to 5.5%) and by 0.2 percentage point in the United States (to 7.0%), while it was stable in Canada (at 6.9%) and Japan (at 4.0%). More recent data referring to the month of December show that the unemployment rate decreased further in the United States (by 0.3 percentage points, to 6.7%) while it increased in Canada (by 0.3 percentage points, to 7.2%).

In November, the OECD unemployment rate for youth showed a significant decline (by 0.3 percentage point to 15.7%). However, the youth unemployment rate remains high in several Euro area countries, in particular in Spain (at 57.7%), Greece (at 54.8% in September, the latest month available), Italy (at 41.6%), Portugal (at 36.8%) and the Slovak Republic (at 33.3%).

Contacts For further information, journalists are invited to contact the OECD's Media Relations Division on (33) 1 45 24 97 00 or news.contact@oecd.org; others should contact the Statistics Directorate on stat.contact@oecd.org.